Eye on the sky

Red Square Nebula is an unusual and highly symmetrical square-shaped nebula. A camera, not the human eye, can capture the glorious color this star mass emanates.

Red Square Nebula is an unusual and highly symmetrical square-shaped nebula. A camera, not the human eye, can capture the glorious color this star mass emanates.

Photo: Encyclopaedia Britannica / UIG Via Getty Images

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The Tadpole nebula, an infrared image from NASA.

The Tadpole nebula, an infrared image from NASA.

Photo: Universal History Archive / UIG Via Getty Images

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The Orion Nebula in the constellation of Orion the Hunter.

The Orion Nebula in the constellation of Orion the Hunter.

Photo: Joseph Bocchieri#149645 / Flickr Vision / Getty Images

Eye on the sky

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Maybe they did fake the moon landing after all.

That was the only conclusion that made sense to me when I took my first look into the night skies through an observatory’s telescope. Where were the brilliant colors I had come to expect from the thousands of NASA photographs I had studied over the years? Where was Mars, the red planet? Why was the Milky Way various shades of gray, not the multi-hued blue and green wonder pictured in books and science fiction movies?

“What happened to the colors?” I ask Rick Bria, vice president of the Astronomical Society of Greenwich and its chief citizen scientist. “Oh, the colors are there,” he says, a little too quickly, I thought. “You just cannot see them with the naked eye.” A likely story from a secret government operative working desperately to keep alive a long-standing cover-up.

Bria is an enthusiastic astronomer who devotes hundreds of volunteer hours every year teaching the public about the wonders of the stars, planets and other cosmic bodies. He could sense I was disappointed, so he did a quick pivot. “You have to check out the moon,” he says, quickly keystroking its location into the computer at the Bowman Observatory in Greenwich. The observatory’s silver dome slowly rotated, and the dark gray carbon telescope soon had that most familiar object in its sights. It was impressive, but the moon is white. I was looking for color. I needed to understand why the muted palette visible through the telescope was so different from the brilliant array of colors sent back from space observations.

“The human eye does not see color at low light,” Bria says. “Just think about what happens when you open your eyes at night in a dark room. At best, you can see different shades of darkness, and you can make out shapes, but you cannot see bright colors.”

The almost other-worldly colors seen in photographs of space result from exposing cameras to an object for hours, often days, at a time. That is how long it takes for a lens to detect the different light waves from deep space and translate them into beautiful colors.

He pulls up a photo of the Helix nebula that is a low- to intermediate-mass star that sheds its outer layers near the end of its evolution. Those outer layers appear as gases when seen through a telescope. The colors come from the intense energy emitted by the star at the center of the nebula. The Helix is sometimes called the “Eye of God,” and is known to “Lord of the Ring” fans as the “Eye of Sauron.” It is the nebula closest to Earth, a mere 20 light years away.

“I try to get to what I call honest colors, which represent the true color of the nebula. But we only have red, green and blue as our primary colors, so even though there are many shades of those colors, it is not an exact match. I calibrate my color by using a white star to determine what white is, and then adjust everything else. Are the colors exactly what you would see if you were floating in space above the nebula? No, but they are very close,” says Bria, wearing a NASA jacket and sounding as if he would board the first space ship to a nebula if he had the chance. “I just cannot get enough of this.”

Bria was also preoccupied preparing for his trip to Idaho, where he planned to observe and photograph the recent total solar eclipse. I spoke to him upon his return. “This is the third one I’ve seen,” he says. “I was just north of Idaho Falls at a pretty high elevation. It was high enough that I could see across the 35-mile radius of the shadow to where the sun was still shining in the distance. The eclipse is different every time. But for me, this was the first eclipse of the digital age. The last one, I was still using film. I was able to get so many exposures that I am trying to assemble a photograph that simulates what you see with the naked eye,” Bria says.

“Wait a minute, so now the naked eye sees better than the camera?” I ask. “Oh yeah,” he says. “In deep space, the camera wins. But in an eclipse, your eye sees both faint and bright at the same time. Cameras don’t do that. The eyes win hands down.”

Bob Horton is a columnist for the Greenwich Time and a regular contributor to Sunday Arts & Style.